#txwatson

[unmakingandincorporeality]

This one's gonna be a Lot. Find out which of a selection of 18 cards out of Watson's Sunset Oracle Deck you are

uQuiz says this deck isn't ready for social media. I think social media isn't ready for this quiz

I was working on this until 5 a.m. with my friend Kai then I got about 3 hours of sleep and right now it seems like a good idea to use real human dollars to make 2500 of you look at it

[was-once-somewhere-else]

Shares in my immortal soul are available at txwatson.com/my-soul -- and I've just added regular USPS postal rates! That means the price of a stamp! I'm still worried that you're going to get your share bent or folded if you pick that, but that risk is now yours to take if you don't want to pay the $20+ extra it costs to get the USPS to promise not to bend your shit.

[corvidfeathers]

quick little doodle of my take on a character from a novella my friend @txwatson wrote!  her name is kim and she’s a queer punk rock musician living a double life and I Love Her and have been meaning to draw her for a while

[was-once-somewhere-else]

[selfcallednowhere]

txwatson said:                                                                                                   I have a really warm relationship with this song. It really captures what my experience of dissociation is like, so it’s actually really grounding and comforting. I do tend to forget that other people are rightly terrified by it, tho 

Oh really? That’s interesting. I’m glad you’re able to get some comfort from the song! I definitely know how nice it is to have songs that you feel like accurately represent shitty stuff you’re going through--there definitely can be a lot of comfort in that.

[morhath]

txwatson replied to your post “The other day I spaced out and took my meds before I ate breakfast and...”

Congratulations! That's so exciting! Idk if this is coming off as sarcastic but I don't mean it that way I'm just really happy to hear you've discovered a way to improve your experience of your meds!

Nah, you’re good.  And it is exciting!  I did get sick this morning, though, so maybe it was just a fluke.  I’m gonna keep experimenting with it.

[morhath]

txwatson replied to your post “Sure would be Fun And Zesty if after all the time and money I’ve spent...”

Jesus, I scanned this wrong at first glance and didn't notice the "if" -- I hope (a.) That this hasn't happened, and (b.) That this doesn't happen!

I most likely won’t know until the day before I’m supposed to leave.  :-)

[watsons-solarpunk]

In a solarpunk society, what would the typical house or apartment be like in your opinion? Housing in general, because I'd love to think there wouldn't be a homeless issue because everyone has access to housing. What about the concept of gated communities, are those abolished here? Are there battered women shelters/abuse victim shelters for those in abusive households? Are they easily, readily accessible?

I’m not sure there’d be such a thing as a typical house or apartment in solarpunk. Living situations would be tailored to the environment, the resources available, the lifestyles of the people living there, and the needs of the community. In some cases that might mean basically a dormitory. In others, it might mean apartments almost as separate as entire houses. (Buildings with apartments are way more energy-efficient than single-family houses, though, so I’d say definitely that more often.)

Ending homelessness is definitely a first-order solarpunk issue, and I think the best possible solution is to just make housing extremely accessible – to the point where you can ditch your current household and go get a new place to sleep that day – or maybe in a few days, and with systematic approaches to make sure people in that process have a place to sleep and a place to put their stuff.

Gated communities are a tough one: I often imagine solarpunk communities being “gated” in the sense that they’re physically barricaded to prevent police and military intervention, but “gated community” is arguably a more specific concept than that, and I do think any decent solarpunk community would not involve a presumption of ill will by anyone entering.

In broad strokes that could also work as a solution to the need for abuse shelters: one of the major reasons people stay in abusive situations is financial dependence. If just leaving is never going to put you at risk of sleeping on the street or losing your possessions, I think the problem of abuse would fall to a fraction of its current magnitude.

That said, there are still going to be a lot of cases of abuse that entail significantly more risk and complexity. What’s needed in those cases is a community that’s capable of assessing the situation and providing solutions tailored to the specific abuse. In a solarpunk community, I’d like to see people form organizations people can reach out to, to get that kind of specific help. I think in some cases it might be valuable for abuse victims to live together to provide collective support, or to live with that organization for a period of time, for safety and to re-acclimate to a non-hostile environment.

It’s important to note that escaping an abusive home is not the end of the experience. It’s common for people to slip into depressive states for a period after leaving an abusive environment, as their mind and body recovers from being constantly, exhaustingly on-guard. Survivors need support in that environment, because without it they often feel like they’d be better off back in their previous environment – where they were, after all, functioning “better.”

Under capitalism, people are set up to rely for their autonomy on obedience to an employer, or to someone who controls their access to resources. The kind of power an abuser exercises over their victims in a home situation is a special case of that control. (That’s not to say other kinds of abuse aren’t possible, but that’s the core of interpersonal abuse in capitalism.)

(btw, I’d be interested to see someone discuss – with care, sensitivity, and trigger warnings – what the structural shape of abuse would look like in both historical and speculative economies. E.g. under feudalism relationship abuse is leveraged on the pattern established by the divine right of kings and the feudal hierarchy.)